Nature (theology)

“ Knowledge of Nature understood in this sense, and obtained in this way, is what we are now told is alone valuable—what human happiness depends on. And assuredly it deserves to be called in the strictest sense theology. If God be the Ruler of the world, as the orthodox theology teaches, the laws of Nature are the laws by which he rules it. If you prefer the pantheistic view, they are the very manifestations of the Divine Nature. In any case the knowledge of Nature, if only it be properly sifted from the corrupting mixture of mere opinion, is the knowledge of God. ”

“ But when we are invited to love and wonder at the world, as the work of God, we must guard against the old trick of substitution which is constantly played upon us. Once more, the God of nature is turned into the God of a part of nature. Theology of the old stamp, so far from encouraging us to love nature, teaches us that it is under a curse. ”

“ It would be legitimate to call such general views of the relation of Nature to our ideals by the name of theology in all cases, and not merely those particular general views which are encouraging. If we believe that Nature helps us in our strivings, we have both a theology and a faith; if we believe that Nature is indifferent to us, or hostile to us, we have no faith, but we have still a theology. ”

“ By the Deity we mean—and I suppose everyone means—the all-controlling consciousness of the universe as well as the infinite, unfathomable, and unknowable abyss of being beyond. By divinity we mean the essence of the nature of the immanent God, the innermost and all-determining quality of that nature; we have already seen that according to the Christian religion the innermost quality of the divine nature is perfect love. ”

“ And the very first attempt to answer these spontaneous questions produces the first theory of natural theology, inaugurating the reign of the earliest natural religion.
But the curiosity of the intellect never slumbers, and the problem repeats itself from age to age: What is the magnificent and mysterious power above man and before nature, the primordial Cause of all phenomena? ”

“ But it cannot and does not deny that Nature, too, is a revelation of God; it ought not to deny that natural philosophy is a part of theology, that there is a theology which may be called natural, and which does not consist in a collection of the evidences of benevolent design in the universe, but in a true deduction of the laws which govern the universe, whatever those laws may be, and whatever they may seem to indicate concerning the character of God. ”

“ To adduce whatever evidence may be contained in general revelation for the immortality of the soul and a future state of rewards and punishments. Natural Natural theology is the systematic exposition of the truths in theology, natural or general revelation. Its data are the facts and laws of nature, as ascertained by physical, mental, and historical science. ”

“ This being so, it seems that the natural revelation or manifestation of God, made by the works of nature, is the only one which can be rightly defended, and this may be divided into universal or common, and particular or singular. The universal indeed is affected by the natural faculties of the mind, and other helps of the universal nature of things, by which man is led to conceive and cultivate the knowledge of divine things. ”

“ This Revelation, however, is nothing else but the action of God as Creator, giving and preserving to nature its existence, form, and life. Created things embody Divine Ideas, and are thus imitations of their antitypes, the Divine Perfections. The human intellect, in particular, is an image of the Divine Intellect: the Creator endows it with the power to infer, from visible nature, the existence and perfections of its Author; and, from its own spiritual nature, the spiritual nature of the Author of all things. ”

“ Let us account for all we see by the facts we know. If there are things for which we cannot account, let us wait for light. To account for anything by supernatural agencies is, in fact to say that we do not know. Theology is not what we know about God, but what we do not know about Nature. ”

“ In endeavoring to rise from Nature to a conception of a creating and ruling spirit, different in character from what observation of Nature would lead us to imagine that spirit to be, theology has become involved in endless contradictions. The Christian idea of the Deity would seem to have been developed in the light of the sympathies which have arisen in the domestic and social life of man. ”

“ Nature, according to all systems of Christian theology, is God's ordinance. Whether with science you stop short at Nature, or with theology believe in a God who is the author of Nature, in either case Nature is divine, for it is either God or the work of God. This whole domain is common to science and theology. When theology says, Let us give up the wisdom of men and listen to the voice of God, and when science says. Let us give up human authority and hollow a priori knowledge and listen to Nature, they are agreed to the whole extent of the narrower proposition, i. ”

“ But to pursue this last topic as it deserves, would carry us away from the domain of Natural Theology, and into that of Theology true and proper.
Our business has lain with the Natural world, human nature itself included. ”

“ while yet he himself is an example of that which we wish to illustrate, that those who have obtained the furthest insight into nature, have been in all ages firm believers in God. ”

“ According to the seventy aphorisms, Nature is one of these principles. It is uncreated and eternal. It is one, active, creating, non-intelligent. The other of the two principles, also uncreated and eternal, is Soul, or rather Souls. ”

“ Science, which is the logic of nature, demands proportion between the house and its foundation. Theology sometimes builds weighty structures on a doubtful base. ”

“ Nature Eternally Alterable. GOD, without Error: Nature, full of Irregularities. GOD knows exactly, or perfectly, Nature: Nature doth not perfectly know GOD. GOD is Infinitely and Eternally worshipped: Nature is the Eternal and Infinite Worshipper.
CHAP. V. All the Parts of Nature worship God.
All Creatures (as I have said) have an Innate Notion of GOD; and as they have a Notion of God, so they have a Notion to worship GOD: but, by reason Nature is composed of Parts; so is the Infinite Worship to God: and, as several Parts are dividing and uniting after several kinds, sorts, manners and ways ”

“ Studies in Nature lead us to cherish the idea of a God, who created, who regenerates, who preserves this universe by invariable laws, and by a continued chain of similar causes, producing similar effects; who pervades all Nature with His Divine Spirit, as a universal Soul, which moves, directs, and restrains the fabric of this world. The blissful idea of a God sweetens every moment of our time, and embellishes before us the paths of life; invites us delightfully to all the beauties of Nature, and associates us with everything that lives or moves. ”

“ You say, "God is whatever we conceive Him to be." We frame an image of Deity out of our consciousness—it is simply a reflection of our own personality, cast upon the sky like the image seen in the Alps in certain states of the atmosphere—and then fall down and worship that which we have created, not indeed with our hands, but out of our minds. This may be true to some extent of the gods of mythology, but not of the God of Nature, who is as inflexible as Nature itself. You might as well say that the laws of nature are whatever we imagine them to be. ”

“ I understand the belief of the existence of a God, and the sense and practice of those duties, which result from the knowledge, we, by our Reason, have of him and his perfections; and of ourselves and our own imperfections; and of the relation we stand in to him and to our fellow creatures; so that the "Religion of Nature" takes in every thing that is founded on the Reason and Nature of Things. ”

“ According to this pantheistic view, nature and God are the same thing viewed differently. God, foreshortened and taken in the limited perspectives defined by man's earth-bound intelligence, is nature; nature, consummated, seen in its fullness and harmony, is God. ”

“ I answer, The action by which God created the World or made Nature, was it natural or supernatural? surely you will say it was a Supernatural and God-like action, why then will you apply Natural Rules to a God-like and Supernatural Action? for what Man knows, how and when God created Nature? You will say, the Scripture doth teach us that, for it is not Six thousand years, when God created this World, I answer, the holy Scripture informs us onely of the Creation of this Visible World, but not of Nature and natural Matter ”

“ My thesis, in other words, is this: that some outward reality of a nature defined as God's nature must be defined, is the only ultimate object that is at the same time rational and possible for the human mind's contemplation. ”

“ The world and nature are marvellous in their being, but they are not “divine”! The formula “natura sive deus” is a monstrous misuse of the word “deus,” if we are to use the words in the sense which history has given to them. God is the Absolute Being, perfect, wholly independent, resting in Himself, and necessary; nature is entirely contingent and dependent, and at every point of it we are impelled to ask “Why?” ”

“ But on the other hand, all our understanding of, or intelligence from God, is communicated to us by the intervention of natural causes, (which is not of the divine essence;) this we denominate to be natural revelation, for that it is mediately made known to Us by our senses, and from our sensations of external objects in general, so that all and every part of the universe, of which we have any conception, is exterior from the nature or essence of God ”

“ There is not, and never was, any necessary connection between any theory of Nature's history and the kernel of religion—the sense of a supreme mystery behind Nature, the sense of, moral obligation transcending utility, and the hope of everlasting life. ”

“ Of a [pg 103] universal mind out of nature, nature says nothing; and of an omnipotence which does not possess an inherent limit in nature, she says nothing either. And therefore that conception of a supreme Being which represents Him as a spirit independent of the physical universe, and able from a standing-point external to nature, to interrupt its order, is a conception of God for which we must go elsewhere. That conception is attained from revelation, which is asserted to be proved by miracles. ”

“ All the beauty of the world, all its truths, all its goodness, are but so many modes under which God is manifested, of whose glory Nature is the veil, of whose word it is the expression, whose law and reason it embodies. But God is not exhausted in the world, nor dependent upon it: He exists eternally in His Triune Being, self-sufficing, self-subsistent.... God is not only in Nature as its life, but He transcends it as its Creator, its Lord—in its moral aspect—its Judge. ”

“ He makes no distinction, or at most only one of degree, between God and nature. God, God’s Word, God’s Son, the Holy Spirit, and nature are with him only various aspects or manifestations of the same power, which is all in all ”

“ But it will be observable that, in the instances cited, though God is in Nature and manifesting Himself through it, there is a clear distinction between Nature and God. It may seem as if it were merely the sky, the sun, the stars, the ocean, that are apostrophised: in reality it is a Life, a Spirit, a Power not themselves, in which they live and move and have their being: not to them, but to That, are the prayers addressed. ”

“ I understand our visible nature, not the all-powerful nature of the Divine Life. For, to this, as being nature of all the living creatures, and especially the more Divine, no life is against nature, or above nature. ”

“ Many feel ecstasy at the sight of beautiful natural objects, and it might be said it does not interpret emotion precisely to make a facile reference to a divine world. I believe of nature that it is a manifestation of Deity, and that, because we are partakers in the divine nature, all we see has affinity with us; and though now we are as children who look upon letters before they have learned to read, to the illuminated spirit its own being is clearly manifested in the universe even as I recognise my thought in the words I write. ”

“ Since all these objects represent, more or less, the divine mind, and are in perfect harmony with it, and so always at one with God, they express, it may be, all of deity which Matter in these three modes can contain, and thus exhibit all of God that can be made manifest to the eye, the ear, and the other senses of man. Since these things are so, Nature is not only strong and beautiful, but has likewise a religious aspect. ”

“ The passage itself is a clear statement of the grounds of the charge, and requires our careful consideration. “Everybody may collect from the order and harmony of the physical universe the existence of a God; but in acknowledging a God, we do not thereby acknowledge this peculiar or doctrinal conception of a God. We see in the structure of nature a mind, a universal mind, but still a mind which only operates and expresses itself by law. Nature only does and can inform us of mind in nature; but in no other sense does nature witness to the existence of an omnipotent Supreme Being. ”

“ This, at least, is my reading of nature and of history in the light of the completed evolution of the Christ. The normal growth through history of the Ideal Man, is the incarnation of the Divine Man. The mischievous antithesis between the realms of the natural and the supernatural, that kept the world's thought from crystallizing around the world's soul, disappears in an Order which is at once natural in all its processes, and supernatural in its source and plan and energy. ”